Author: ToorAdmin

New feature: the Tournament Playlist

One of the challenges a tournament organizer has to face is getting the word out. Toornament already provides tools such as the Widgets to convey information about an upcoming competition, and a new one is added to the list today: the Tournament Playlist.
This is a page where any user can create a selection of tournaments, to be shared as a whole page, or via a new Widget:

This is especially useful for LAN Parties, such as the 2019 Gamers Assembly above, that gathered all of their 2019 tournaments in a single playlist. But there are many other situations where a playlist comes in handy, like for the League of Legends “Grosse Ligue”, the French university league. The competition is first played on a regional level, and here are all the regional tournaments:

These are examples, but there are many other cases where it might be useful, would you want to share the tournaments you have participated in, or simply want to create a list of tournaments you want to share! Go ahead and try the Playlists, they are available for everyone!

Indie games on Toornament

Toornament is an open esports platform, and as such, we have huge communities of players from the Triple-A and leading esports titles, but that does not mean we shun other games or communities, quite the contrary actually!
We have always had a down-to-earth approach about smaller and indie games, in that they might just be the next phenomenon, and bring something new to the table.
As such, we strongly believe that all games that want to go competitive deserve their spot on the platform and we want to make everything we can to make them feel at home. This way, they will have access to all the features that enable a great competitive environment.

We regularly add new games, big and indie, on the platform, and part of our latest batch was Ultimate Chicken Horse by Clever Endeavour Games, an indie party game that wanted to provide their community with tools to organize their competitions and tournaments.

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a party game in which you place traps on the level, and try to reach the finish line before your opponents

“Some of our community members there were already running fan tournaments, and ever since we’ve been meaning to help them do so by providing our support as well as the right tools to make their lives easier.
Due to the free-for-all design of our game, we needed a platform that integrates the 1v1v1v1 format for tournaments. We’re also excited about Toornament TV, because we have seen a lot of demand for the streaming of tournament matches.”
– Genevieve Leblanc, Clever Endeavour Community Manager

So we worked together, and added their game as a discipline on Toornament, for everyone to be able to organize tournaments, from the evening friend-gathering to official events.

Ultimate Chicken Horse on Toornament

“We’re looking forward to seeing the events that the competitive part of our community will organize on Toornament, and hoping to see that community grow more thanks to the platform! This promises to be a big step towards better organization and sharing potential. We don’t have specific plans yet as organizers, but we’re hopeful that this will allow us to feel like Clever Endeavour can take a more official role in running tournaments before long.”
– Genevieve Leblanc, Clever Endeavour Community Manager

We want to welcome the Ultimate Chicken Horse community on Toornament, and we are also eager to see what they come up with!
If you want your game to also get added to Toornament, for your players to enjoy our features, feel free to contact us!

Want to play some FIFA and take on a pro player?

FIFA has always been a top game on Toornament, and its community one of the most active on the platform. So it’s only fair that we put the spotlight on these amazing organizers from time to time, and there is also a great opportunity for our German friends that currently under way with the Charcoal Cup, that can be summarized in a few words:

  • German tournament with 4 qualifiers open to all 16+ residents, that will send 8 finalists to the Museum Soccer in Dortmund
  • Prizes for all finalists, and the winner will take on Proownez for a chance to win better rewards if he wins a series of skill-based duels including FIFA
  • Fun activities and meet&greets organized for all those who will attend, and a complete Livestream of the competition for those who can’t

The Charcoal Cup tournament is not affiliated with or sponsored by Electronic Arts Inc. or its licensors.

The Soccer Museum, with indoor soccer court and other installations

Find all information on the Charcoal Cup Website, and if the registrations for the first qualifier are over, you can still try your skill in the next three:

For those of you who are not in Germany, or did not make it through the qualifiers, we have plenty of other tournaments to hone your FIFA skills, and compete against the world:

Case study: A1 Gaming League

For this new Case study, we visit Bulgaria, with one of the country’s leading provider of telecommunication services and digital solutions: A1.
They approached us to build an esports platform to organize a year-long circuit of online tournaments and qualifiers, leading to offline finals during the Aniventure Comic Con, in September 2019.
To achieve this goal, we built a custom-made website based on the Toornament technology, for them to organize as many tournaments as they wanted, all in their brand design, and thus was born the A1 Gaming League Platform:

A1-home

The website has an information section and a partners showcase, but also news, livestreams, tournaments and rankings linked to the games that are part of the circuit.
The esports aspect of things is handled with the Toornament API, providing schedules, information and results directly on the website:

A1-tournament

Contact us if you wish to learn more about how we could work together on your own esports project!

The most comprehensive tournament engine

The structure is an important part of any successful tournament, an essential element that will keep the players and audience invested in the competition, through progress, twists and storytelling. And in this respect, having a choice when selecting the structure best suited to the situation is key. That is why we took on building a comprehensive tournament engine that handles a lot of different tournament structures, adjustable and complementary.
Our structures are split into two categories, the ones for Duel matches, and those designed for Free-for-all matches:

Structures for Duel matches

The Duel structures, built around matches involving two participants, are the most common, just like in regular sports. Either two players or two teams will face off, in an organized series of match, some with elimination involved, some without. There are four bracket-based structures, and three ranking-based ones available on Toornament:

  • Single or Double-Elimination Brackets, Bracket Groups and Gauntlets
  • Round-Robin Groups, Leagues and Swiss Systems

All structures come with advanced seeding options (ability to manually create matches in a league, or switch participants in a Double-Elimination loser’s bracket) and match format customization (to have your matches played in Best-of 1, semifinals in Best-of 3 and grand finals in Best-of 5 if need be).

Structures for Free-for-All matches

With the advent of the Battle Royale genre, we had to come up with solutions for organizers to smoothly organize their competitions, with tools built with this new way to compete in mind. Up to 100 players per game, matches spanning a dozen of games, results based on in-game rank and kills? All of this is covered in our FFA Structures, that come in 3 variants:

  • Simple Stage, to create matches at will, for all purposes
  • Single-Elimination FFA Bracket, built with the same logic as its Duel counterpart, but on another scale entirely
  • FFA Bracket Groups, for when you have so many players you need to have them split into groups

These structures work conjointly with an advanced match format built to accommodate the Battle Royale features, among others.

So if you plan to organize an esports event, and are looking for the best structure, here is the Structure Guide you need to read to take your pick!

Use Case: the Ubisoft Gaming League

For this new article, we decided to leave the reins of the blog to Nicolas Mivielle, Production Manager from Ubisoft Montreal, for him to tell us more about their internal competition, the Ubisoft Gaming League, that they organize regularly with the help of Toornament:

Hello, my name is Nicolas Mivielle, I have been an organizing member of the Ubisoft Gaming League (UGL) for 5 years, and we will celebrate the 6th anniversary of the competition this year.
It’s an internal association that has been created and is maintained by Ubisoft Montreal employees on their free time, with a simple objective in mind: organize competitions and video games tournaments for all Ubisoft Montreal employees.


Overwatch final with public during Season 5

We want to give the employees a sharing time and space with their colleagues (we really focus on the fun side of the competitions), but also let them discover games that may not be part of the Ubisoft catalogue. For our 5 years anniversary, we also added a new dimension to the UGL, with a partnership with a game that’s yet to be announced, with a strong esport side. We organized an internal tournament, on an Alpha version of the game, to provide the studio with feedback, and check their objectives and ambition, thanks to our huge pool of competitive players and organizers.
We hope that this kind of partnerships will develop in the future, because it was a blast organizing such a competition, and the input has been invaluable for the studio.

Since the beginning of this initiative, we have organized close to 40 tournaments that gathered several hundreds participants. We work with seasons and blocks, and try to have tournaments on as many game genres as possible (MOBA, Fighters, MMO, FPS, RTS etc.). Ubisoft Montreal graciously makes everything we need available, with a total freedom when it comes to organization and communication matters.


DOTA2 casters with prizes behind for Season 6

We finish each season with a Just Dance tournament during a summer gathering where all 3,000 employees are present, before the beginning of the next one in September.
We do use Toornament for the whole process, for both public and private tournaments of the UGL. It’s a great tool that is perfect for all of our needs. We plan on diving deeper into the advanced functionnalities of the Toornament technology, like the TV or the API, for a better integration into our website. This will allow for more visibility and a customized experience for everyone.


Just Dance grand final for the end of season 5

We will soon start the 2nd Block of our Season 6, with For Honor and Rocket League tournaments. We will also organize a “Tournament of Power” in this block, which was a new format we experimented last season, that consists of an evening with many different fighting games, and the ability to qualify on any game present before the finals.

For those that would want to learn more about our organization, or follow our public tournaments, head to the UGL Website, or the UGL Twitch Channel, where we stream all public finals.

Thank you Nicolas for the extensive presentation of the Ubisoft Gaming League, and congratulations on the great initiative!
Don’t hesitate contacting us if you are wondering how Toornament could help you build great events for your co-workers or employees!

New bracket format available: the Gauntlet

We introduced with our recent structure update the Gauntlet bracket, a format that our organizers have been asking for, and we are delivering!
A Gauntlet is a type of duel-match bracket used as final stage in a tournament, usually following a League or Swiss Stage. It is a mono-branch single-elimination bracket in which only a handful of teams will play, with an important advantage given to the highest-ranked teams from the first stage.
In fact, in this type of stage, you place participants in matches up to the grand finals, depending on their #Seed:

This format is widely used in League of Legends Asian leagues, and is gaining traction in Europe too, with this season’s French Official League planning to use it aswell.
Here is an example of this new stage in our widget:

APEX Legends – The latest Battle Royale sensation!

It is hard to believe you would not have heard about Apex Legends, but just in case, it is the latest Battle Royale released by Electronic Arts and developed by Respawn, the creators of the Titanfall series. It’s fast-paced, brutal and seems to have understood everything a Battle Royale must be and do to succeed.

The post-launch numbers are quite eloquent:

Apex Stats

And the first weekend saw a peak concurrent players at more than 2 Million players, and almost 500,000 viewers on Twitch. Needless to say, the launch has been a huge success, and we felt it on Toornament too, with a lot of Apex Legends Tournaments created since the release of the game!

Official tournaments have also started, with the first Twitch Rivals on Apex Legends having been held earlier this month, with European and North American teams challenging each other to a points race during an evening:

So if you want to join the hype train, gather two of your friends and drop in King’s Canyon with your powers and weapons to claim the victory! And if you have the soul of an organizer, we have the perfect guide to help you organize your Apex Legends tournament!

Introducing Brackets for Free-for-All tournaments!

Our latest Structure update brought two new Free-for-All structures to our ever-expanding list, and those have been among the greatest challenges we have had to face. But we prevailed, and are proud to present to you our two new additions:

FFA Single-Elimination Brackets

These brackets work just like the standard Duel ones, except there can be up to 100 participants in a single match, with a portion of them advancing forward in the next round.
We adapted the rules of the standard duel brackets to the Free-for-All format, with a smart distribution of seeds in matches between rounds and no re-match between participants for as long as possible, thus keeping everything that makes a bracket interesting and competitive. Our FFA brackets are not just a linear series of matches where people will keep playing against the same opponents every time!

FFA Bracket Groups

We also created a variation upon this new format, with FFA Bracket Groups, that allow you to split your participants into several groups, where they will play Single-Elimination FFA Brackets to qualify for a final match or bracket!

With these two new structures, we confirm our will to remain the leading technology for all things esports, and no doubt our organizers will make good use of these new structures! And with the increasing number of Super Smash Bros Ultimate and Apex Legends tournaments, to quote only a few remarkable examples, no doubt the need for more advanced structures was becoming a pressing one, and here they are!